


Dance Up On Them Haters

by gelbes_gilatier



Series: Old War Wounds [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1950s, Attempted Sexual Assault, F/M, Past Sexual Assault, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Post-World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 17:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2740349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gelbes_gilatier/pseuds/gelbes_gilatier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Christmas is fast approaching, with people mending and making do and trying to scrounge up enough sugar and butter and flour ration stamps to get together enough for baking cookies and surveying the pile of meat stamps in their little kitchen tins with a critical eye.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dance Up On Them Haters

**Author's Note:**

> [Holiday Fic Request Meme](http://gelbes-gilatier.livejournal.com/357628.html), attempt #4. A-HA! On time, just for once! Old traditions die hard, so yes, I'm visiting my Slytherin and Gryffindor OCs, Jane and Damien again, like I always do once a year. This year, Jane was being exceptionally difficult but it worked out fine in the end. Err, more or less. Here's the result.

**Dance Up On Them Haters **

_“When you get elevated_ _,_  
 _They love it or they hate it_  
 _You dance up on them haters_  
 _Keep getting funky on the scene_  
 _While they jumpin’ round you_  
 _They trying to take all your dreams_  
 _But you can’t allow it.”_

_Janelle Monàe, „Tightrope_ _“_

  
Christmas is fast approaching, with people mending and making do and trying to scrounge up enough sugar and butter and flour ration stamps to get together enough for baking cookies and surveying the pile of meat stamps in their little kitchen tins with a critical eye. It’s 1951 and people are still standing in line for their food and all she can think about is that for the first time in her life, she doesn’t know where to go for Christmas.

For the past thirty years, she always knew exactly where she would be for Christmas, what she would be wearing, eating, saying. Even what she would be getting because she never was above using her Divination skills for a bit of personal gain. Even during the war, she managed to sneak off to Disapparate to Cornwall, if only for two hours of listening to the winter winds howl around the old lonely house, only recently bereft of most of its living inhabitants. Two weeks ago, Cornwall ceased to be an option for the rest of her life, and she is fine with that.

It doesn’t change, though, that she still doesn’t know where to go. She has a tiny flat in Cheapside with a leaking roof that apparently no amount of magic can fix and a fireplace that doesn’t draw half as well as it should and she makes a point of not using it for more than sleeping between shifts at St. Mungo’s. It’s not an option.

There are also half a dozen standing invitations issued by a number of families that used to be thick with her parents, all Slytherin legacies, and all very eager to introduce her to their sons of marriageable age, do her a favor and get her off the shelf, even though she’s firmly in old maid territory with her thirty years of age. As if she didn’t go to Hogwarts with every last one of them, and had rejected them as possible candidates back in her first year.

There is, of course, Damien.

Damien who has no family to speak of, either. Damien, who took eight years to reappear in her life, on a cold and wet October night. Damien, who ever since two weeks ago keeps opening his mouth as if to tell her something and shuts it, looking vaguely ill every time he does it. It’s driving her _bonkers_.

Bonkers enough that she told him he didn’t have to pick her up after her shift tonight, like he’s been doing semi-regularly throughout the last year. He’d looked so crestfallen that she had felt obliged to add that really, she didn’t mind if he did, though. She’d still prefer it if he didn’t come round tonight because her head is full of questions and her shift had been unusually stressful and she can’t use his fumbling around tonight.

So she packs up her things and tells the night warden to have a look on the misfired transfigurations ward and heads out, into the cold and drizzly December evening, debating whether to stop buy the Leaky Cauldron before heading back to Cheapside and being so lost in her thoughts that she nearly misses someone calling her name. When she hears it, she accelerates her steps, not in the mood for talking to the owner of _that_ voice.

Unfortunately, Henry James Worthington never was anything but persistent and the worthless git actually has the guts to Apparate in front of her when she pretends not having heard him a third time, instead of at least wasting his breath running up to her like any decent man would have. “Fancy meeting you here, Miss Walcott.”

Really? “Fancy meeting you here”? He’d stoop so low as trying to make it all look like he was _just_ strolling by this part of London, in his _finest_ robes, even wearing that ridiculous beaver hat he’d worn at Hogwarts whenever he could? Really. “What do you want, Harry?”

He’d always hated people calling him that, had always lectured people about his parents having had a _reason_ for giving him two very esteemed first names and could people please respect that and _use_ them? She’d be lying if she denied that the disgusted look on his face at being called Harry hadn’t given her a bit of satisfaction. “Still as charming as ever, aren’t we?”

She doesn’t know about _him_ but “charming” was never part of her personality. Back, as a child in Hogwarts and even more so as a teenager, she was awkward, bookish, preferred the library to the common room or Great Hall. After Hogwarts, during the Phony War and Dunkirk, something in her changed, turned her awkwardness into a genuine love for being by herself and well, the war, in the end, changed everything. Sometimes it feels as if going through the war as a QA was like casting off her skin, only that she didn’t cast off her skin, she cast off herself and now, when she sees pictures of herself from before the war, she can’t believe that’s her.

For a moment, she considers skipping a hot meal at the Leaky Cauldron and Disapparating directly to her flat but Worthington’s not here for a cordial visit. His people, they always want something and they don’t stop until they get it. She goes for a bored look. “Just say your piece and let me be on my way, Harry.” It’s almost perverse how much she enjoys seeing him cringe every time she says that name.

“Not so fast, dearest Miss Walcott.” Oh good, now he made her want to gag. “Just yesterday, I had a very pleasant chat with your grandmother – formidable old woman, by the way, my absolute admiration – and she mentioned that…”

“I think I’m done here. Good night, Harry, and please don’t bother to give my regards…” _Bloody hell_.

Faster than she would ever have given him credit for, his hand shoots up to grip her wrist painfully hard so that she can’t wave her wand to Disapparate after all. Something in her… just clicks and maybe it’s her time in the desert with men who’d forgotten how to behave in polite company or the Bulge when they’d _all_ forgotten how to move in polite company or those six months in post-war Germany and hollering GIs at every corner but she doesn’t even think about it, just _reacts_ and thirty seconds later he’s hopping on one foot, clutching the shin of the leg in the air and yowling around while it takes her a while to realize that she’s standing in a street in London, not a war zone.

Her heart is racing and the wand in her outstretched hand is shaking but she would have cast a perfect Cruciatus anyway, if it hadn’t been for another voice from behind her telling her impossibly calm, “Jane, _don’t_.”

She doesn’t turn around, her breath still heaving, flashes of encounters like the one she just had with Worthington she had in the war coming back to her, nothing staying long enough but the feeling of having to protect herself at all costs pervading everything. Her wand is still pointing at Worthington who looks like he can’t decide between gloating and screaming bloody murder and she could cast a Cruciatus, she _could_ and it would be perfect and he’d be writhing in pain and she wouldn’t regret a _thing_ and she doesn’t. “He’s not… Jane, he’s not worth it.”

The one thing she hates most about this entire situation is that of all the people in her life, Damien Bournewithe is probably the only one who bothered to get to know her well enough to know without doubt what she was about to do, without even having to see her face. She doesn’t know how much he saw of what had transpired between her and Worthington but apparently, it had been enough for him to run up to her and very quietly remind her not to lose a shred of that humanity she had fought so hard to regain after the war.

Very well. Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe she doesn’t hate the fact that he’s the only one to know her so well. Maybe she hates the fact that he is _right_. Henry James Worthington isn’t worth getting into the hassle of having cast an Unforgivable Curse.

So she takes a deep breath, slowly takes down her wand and moves to turn around. She doesn’t even know what she’s going to say to Damien – after all, she hadn’t exactly been in the mood to see _him_ , either – but she doesn’t get that far, hearing a scraping sound behind her, and a huff or something like that and reflexes trained by years in a war zone and on St. Mungo’s Janus Thickey Ward kick in as she whirls around, wand in hand, shouting, “ _Petrificus Totalus_!” and hitting Worthington squarely in the chest, just as he was about to jump her. Or maybe Damien.

Which doesn’t matter now, since she got him good, made him keel over, now lying on the cobblestones, face still contorted in rage. She regards him with a look, cold enough to give _her_ the creeps, before she takes a deliberate step back, brings distance between him and her. If she hadn’t been finished with that part of the wizarding world before, now would be the moment. She is just so _done_ with all of them.

“Jane…” No. Not today. A part of her wants, _yearns_ to be with Damien, to curl up in his arms like she did after that visit to Cornwell two weeks ago. The other part, the stronger part, the part that’s been there longer, just wants to run and run and run away which is probably why she doesn’t just Disapparate, instead firmly turns around to briskly walk away, her heels clacking much too loud on the cobblestones below. “No, Jane, listen!”

She’s had enough of men telling her what to do for one day, and she keeps walking on and hears him running up to her and wishes he would have been a spineless git and Apparated, like Worthington, so she could hate him for it. “Please! Look, I _know_ I’ve been a bleeding idiot for the last few weeks,” no doubt about _that_ , “but I just… I didn’t know if you’d like it.”

Merlin, she _hates_ it when he does that. Hates it that he makes her stop and turn around and ask him, “Like _what_?” with a frown.

He stops, too maybe an arm length away from her, surprise written all over his face which tells her that it wasn’t a ploy to get her interested, just Damien being a Gryffindor and talking before thinking again. Which makes her even more furious. _Why_ does he always have to be so _decent_ , even when he’s being an arse? “This. I just… didn’t know if you’d like this.” This what, she wants to ask and then notices the outstretched hand, carrying a small, worn looking box, covered in faded dark velvet.

She frowns again. “I don’t… understand.” She does, in a way, and she doesn’t.

“Well, uh…” If it weren’t so dark, she’d see him blush for sure, something he rarely does and hates doing and she almost feels sorry for making him explain it. _Almost_. “You see,” he says and opens the box, a revealing a ring nestled there between two folds, looking equally worn as the little box it’s in, “it was my mother’s. Only thing I could rescue beside the sofa and…”

“What does it have to do with _me_?” Even as she asks it, as it’s barely out, she realizes her mistake. She didn’t even have to see the look of hurt crossing his face to realize it.

She didn’t even have to hear him say, “Isn’t it… obvious?” to know what the ring is for and what is has to do with her.

Because it _is_ obvious, and at least a lot of things make sense now. Why he agreed to go and visit Grandmere with her. Why he’d been fumbling around with words for two weeks afterward. Why he’d come to St. Mungo’s, to pick her up like he always does.

Why he looks like a cat kicked into the corner by its owner after sitting in her lap for a full hour, trying to purr away all hurt and pain. She feels sorry for doing it, wishes she hadn’t done it, wishes _he_ hadn’t done that. Because if he hadn’t, they could have gone on business as usual, could have kept telling themselves it’s all casual, all no strings attached, could have kept pretending to themselves that ending it wouldn’t be much of a big thing. Even though she’d told her grandmother that she loves him, had yelled it loud enough for even the last ghost hearing it. Loud enough to scare herself back into her shell of annoyance and irritation.

Loud enough for him to hear and make a decision. Making _her_ make a decision, one she’d thought she was off the hook of ever having to make.

She stares back at the ring, swallows, avoids looking into his face because she knows how it would screw with her head, her heart, how it would make her say things she might or might not regret. It’s her turn to fumble for words now and it takes her ages to reach a conclusion but she does. She takes a deep breath, then, steels herself and still keeps avoiding his face, “Damien, I…"

 


End file.
